An occasional spiritual exercise of a homeschooling mother of 10 children and wife to a wonderful, holy husband!

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Remember back in April I said something about having animals on our land? I was thinking maybe next summer we would get a few chickens and see how things went.

Providence has seen fit to let me find out sooner how things will go. A friend had to move away on short notice, and I ended up with her chickens! There were 21 hens and a rooster when I went to get them (they were young, so they all fit into one large travel dog kennel). 5 weeks later,having lost 2 (one to the neighbors’ dogs, the other to ???) they are getting pretty big, and we have gotten up to a dozen eggs a day in the last few days.

our first egg

This is the first egg we got from our young hens. You can see the colors in some of their feathers here as well. We have Rhode Island Reds, Speckled Sussex, and one Golden Laced Wyandotte. The rooster is a Speckled.

Here you can see our handsome rooster.

Peter named him Luke Skywalker

The chicken with many names

This beautiful hen has had many names. The previous owner named her Betty. When I brought her home she escaped from the pen 3 times the first day, so I called her Henny Houdinni. For a while the kids called her The Queen because she was the biggest and oldest (1 year old) of all the rest of the chickens. Lucy named her Sally Henny Penny, and I usually call her Henny.

Here are a couple of our Speckled Sussex hens. Margaret named the one on the left Sparkles. The one on the right looks too much like the other hens to have her own name yet.

Rhode Island Red hen

This hen has no name. Neither do any of the 15 Rhode Island Reds. They all look alike. So I call them all “Chicken.”

Pretty Red

Ain’t she purty?

Right after we took this picture, the kids came in with another egg. They lay eggs all day, not just over night, apparently.